Some Blundering About Star Trek: Discovery 4×08: All In

We ease back into Disco this week with an episode that’s somehow both high-stakes and low-key. The camera remains upright, the fight scene is discrete, the climax is a poker game, and Michael doesn’t even cry.

The downside of this is that it leaves me without a whole lot to say. I continue to revere the mature and respectful dealing with mental health. That Michael recognizes that Book was hurting, but didn’t expect his betrayal. And it’s an interesting turn to see Vance’s sense of betrayal over Tarka. Or Owosekun very quickly getting the gist of Tarka’s underlying issue.  Nice to see her having some character development, even if it’s mostly getting the crap beat out of her in the boxing ring. That bit did feel a little underwritten; we see her get her ass kicked a few times and then she wins for no clear reason other than because of how far we were into the episode. I can’t blame the champ and his booker thinking they got hustled. This is a good episode for Joanne, but it does drive home how poorly Disco uses its ensemble, what with Michael having the narrative gravity of an extragalactic dark matter Big Swirly Thing in Space. Owo’s “thing” seems to be that she’s hella tough, what with her luddite upbringing, and that’s nice and all, especially since she doesn’t look it, being not especially big or visibly buff and being sort of bright-eyed and smiley. But Discovery really isn’t a show whose narrative prizes toughness very often, which leaves Owo without much to do a lot of the time.

They’ve shed so much of the cast at the moment that this episode feels a bit sparse; rather than multiple plot threads, we mostly just have the same plot from two angles. The only respite is a brief scene of Hugh beating himself up for his failure to help Book enough. It’s cute that he yells at the Space Roomba, which retreats, but then sneaks back out again to finish cleaning once they’ve left. Also, as a small nice point, good to see Stamets own what a complete dick he was to Zora.

There’s something deeply unsavory about Tarka, and I hope it turns out to be more interesting than just, “Actually he plans on destroying the whole ding dong universe in a Superboy Prime tantrum over his dead boyfriend.” There is a world of unspoken backstory in the small side-event of a changeling with a nervous tic showing up as a con artist at a space casino. This episode is pretty rich in showing us small weird space stuff to make us nostalgic, but the barge is perhaps a little too claustrophobic? The poker game is fine. They play space poker for the macguffin, but space poker appears to just be Greek Hold ‘Em with a very pretty deck of cards I expect to find on Etsy soon enough.

I was at first a little disappointed that the climax was simply “Book outplays Michael”; I was expecting it to be something where Michael finds herself in the positon of having to let Book win in order to stop the Emerald Chain Wannabees from getting the isolitium. But upon reflection, I’m okay with this turn; the other thing’s been done enough, and it’s a neat twist to reveal that Michael went into it knowing she was going to lose and – in a sense both metaphorical and literal – playing the hand she was dealt as best she could. I do note with very mild derision that they embraced the TV Poker Game trope of having the final hand come down to Book’s flush beating Michael’s straight, rather than any of the seven million poker hands that are way more common – on TV, skill in poker is entirely down to skill at being dealt good cards.

Discovery is well-served by having a smaller, more pleasant sort of episode every once in a while. With the short episode count, that’s not really something they can do very often, and I’m glad they moved the arc forward while doing it. Book and Tarka have settled in to build their doomsday device, Discovery knows where they are, and, kind of out of nowhere as a random coda, we find out what the deal with the 10-C is.

Now, I don’t like the way the reveal scene was written; Michael seems to just magically deduce out of nowhere a lot more detail than makes sense. I’m okay with her coming up with “Hey what if they’re mining something,” and letting Zora work out what exactly. But she jumps immediately to the idea that the BSTiS is a trawl for mining boronite based only on “The 10-C have tremendous energy needs,” and she’s not just right in principle, but in detail: the 10-C live in an immense force-shielded bubble and they need boronite to power it, and they DGAF about life in the galaxy so they’re strip-mining it. Boronite can be used to make the scary and dangerous “Omega Molecule”, which destroys subspace in return for basically infinite energy, so that tracks. This sets up the 10-C as an existential threat to space travel in an even more fundamental way than they already are, but there’s also an implication that they might be desperate to maintain their power supply, and it’s even possible that they’re oblivious to the harm they’re doing. And now we finally start to talk about the element that was curiously absent from the discussion last time: the 10-C have the capacity to fuck shit up seriously in the galaxy, and blowing up the thing which is providing them the power they need to survive is definitely going to provoke them. We also get an oblique allusion to the Kelvin timeline: the DMA is like the Nerada, a simple mining ship which is just so breathtakingly advanced compared to the Federation that it can destroy an entire planet and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.

It wouldn’t make a lick of sense, but if it turned out that the 10-C were the Diviner’s people, that would be just about completely insane enough to be enjoyable. They’re technologically advanced, capable of time travel, but hadn’t made first contact. An extragalactic species that was artificially isolated from other life is a plausible way for that to have happened – and would be a heck of a fun Douglas Adams reference to insert into Star Trek.

I’m not holding out hopes though. I think a slightly more likely possibility (though still pretty unlikely) is that it’s actually an isolated human civilization. In particular, there’s an old Star Trek novel about Young Picard and the Stargazer crew encountering survivors of the SS Valiant – twenty-first century warp ship that had crossed the barrier and subsequently been destroyed by its captain to protect humanity from a crewmember who was developing godlike powers as the backstory to the second TOS pilot episode. Could it be that Disco is mining that concept too? It would be consistent with Discovery‘s frequent interest in revisiting TOS-era concepts that didn’t end up having major influence on ’90s Trek. If the 10-C turned out to be a race of diaspora humans, a thousand years separated from the rest of human culture, with massive psychic powers and technology that had evolved in isolation, it would play very well into Discovery’s major themes and offer a path to healing.

But like I said, it doesn’t seem that likely compared to, “It’s someone we’ve never heard of before.”